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Betty Darby/For Savannah Morning News Today, Inglis practices yoga three times a week to help her cope with old ballet injuries.

For Savannah Morning News Ann Crowell Inglis danced with George Balanchine's New York City Ballet in the 1950s.

Ann Crowell Inglis spent five years dancing with George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet during the 1950s and followed that up with 30 years running a ballet studio in New Jersey and 15 more teaching ballet here in Savannah. Those legs have logged lots of dancing mileage, and she’s had a knee replacement and a hip replacement to deal with the pain of arthritis. Her doctor had told her she would need the other knee and hip done as well, but she hasn’t penciled in any surgery dates on her calendar just yet.

“It just does not hurt anymore,” said the still-lithe dancer as she sipped tea recently in the parlor of her restored Victorian duplex in Savannah. “Oh, I can hear the knee crackle a little bit sometimes, but nothing like it did before.”

The “before” is “before yoga.” Inglis credits her relatively recently acquired habit of practicing yoga with helping resolve arthritis in her joints and even believes it’s behind the improved bone density recorded in her latest medical checkup.

Something’s surely working. Years past the age where folks in less strenuous careers are fully retired, Inglis takes yoga classes three times a week and teaches ballet lessons three times each week at Madeline Walker School of Dance.

A late start

Inglis is a relative newcomer to yoga, which she began several years ago in a class at the Habersham YMCA.

“I just needed some exercise. I didn’t know anything about it,” she said of yoga.

“I went to the Y for a long time and when I had my hip and my knee replaced, I thought, ‘That’s it — I can’t do this.’ Then, I discovered the yoga classes for seniors.”

The classes she is talking about take place twice a week at Savannah’s Yoga Co-op on Drayton Street, taught by Kate Taylor for free and associated with Senior Citizens Inc. Taylor leads her students through a series of yoga poses, starting out seated in chairs and going on to standing poses where the chair back is available to offer help with balance.

Inglis enjoyed getting back into yoga so much that she also joined a paying class at Taylor’s Savannah Power Yoga, where a more strenuous senior yoga session is available.

Stumbling into dance

Inglis got into dance almost by chance. She spent her childhood in Decatur, where her father’s career was with Coca-Cola, minus the years he spent in World War II.

“My very best friend in Decatur took ballet, and for some reason her mother said, ‘Come to ballet school with her today,’ and I took one look and thought it was something I wanted to do. So I asked my mother and she wrote my father — who was in Germany with the Army — to ask permission, and he wrote back, ‘No, I don’t want a daughter with big legs.’”

The mother and daughter duo went ahead anyway, although getting to lessons involved a long trip by streetcar and bus. When the war ended and her father resumed his corporate career, a transfer to San Francisco meant she had a chance to study at dance’s famous Christensen brothers’ school. That led to a position with the San Francisco Ballet and, later, the New York City Ballet.

It proved to be a brilliant career, although short, as dance careers often are. George Balanchine had launched the New York City Ballet in the late 1940s, and Inglis danced with that group from 1952 to 1957, including tours each summer in Europe. During that time, she worked with both Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Even all these years later, she still sounds a bit awed when she talks about Balanchine: “No one called him George. He was always Mr. Balanchine or Mr. B.”

She quit the dance stage when the first of her three children was born, and went on to open her ballet school in New Jersey.

Savannah bound

Inglis’s mother retired to Georgia, and Inglis discovered Tybee Island on vacation. She kept coming back and learned that a friend and former colleague from the New York ballet had also developed a fondness for the Savannah area. The two decided to buy property here in advance of retirement. While waiting to relocate, they rented out to college students the two-story duplex of which each owned a side. A visit to check up on the property persuaded them the step up their timetable.

“We came down here and the house was just horrible,” she remembered. “There was an iguana chained to the ceiling and everything was painted black, I swear.”

Today, the resilient Victorian building shows no signs of its recent past as a Goth pad. The iguana, which was a pet, died some time before the students moved out and is buried somewhere on the grounds. The black paint is gone and the rooms are now furnished in a mix of antiques lightened with such things as a poster from the ballet’s 1953 summer tour performance in Milan.

The home is a good match for its equally resilient owner, who danced with the greats and is still light on her feet.